Ravi Shankar



 Ravi Shankar (7 April 1920 – 11 December 2012) commonly known by the title Pandit, was an Indian musician and composer who played the sitar. He is known as the best-known contemporary Indian musician. He was a nominated member of Rajya Sabha, the upper chamber of the Parliament of India from 1986 to 1992. He was the recipient pf India's highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna, in 1999. He also received three Grammy Awards.

Quotes

 * Thank you, if you appreciate the tuning so much, I hope you will enjoy the playing more.
 * To the audience at The Concert for Bangladesh (1971)


 * Sound is God.
 * Archived interview footage in George Harrison: Living in the Material World (1971)


 * The magic happens only when the artist serves with love and the listener receives with the same spirit.


 * Thank you. If you appreciate the tuning so much, I hope you'll enjoy the playing more.
 * Ravi Shankar, tuning up before his performance, Soundbite of "The Concert For Bangladesh"


 * I didn't start with rock or jazz musicians. It was just my great dear friend whom I miss very much who is no more, Yehudi Menuhin, Lord Yehudi Menuhin. We got very friendly from the year 1952. And when I came to Europe and started performing, we cut three albums in those days, known as "West Meets East." And then I did many other things later on, of course. My student George Harrison, who is like my son, and a great friend of mine, whom I taught sitar initially but later on he was so interested he composed a lot of songs being influenced by our Indian music and Indian spiritual and religious teachings, things like that. And I've done a lot of experimentations, which I don't like to call fusion or trying to mix Indian music or Western music like a cocktail to make it interesting. Genuinely what I wanted to do is have the base as pure as possible Indian music within the framework of raga and tala, and use non-Indian musicians, non-Indian instruments for a special sound, for the range, for the volume, for the colors and all that. And I think some of them came out nice. Of course I was very much criticized also for it...
 * Ravi Shankar during his talk with Gross.

About Ravi Shankar

 * Without...Yehudi Menuhin, the West may not have found Indian classical music and decades later...thanks to Menuhin’s chance meeting and later lasting friendship with the master sitarist Ravi Shankar, the Wets witnessed the sublimity that the merging of the Western and Indian classical music could produce.


 * An hour of the real thing. Ravi Shankar, a wonderful virtuoso, played his own Indian music to us at the radio station. Brilliant, fascinating, stimulating, wonderfully played. Unbelievable skill and invention.
 * By the world's most performed opera composer Benjamin Britten quoted in


 * Pt. Ravi Shankar's Sitar played for our souls. His music helped us sooth our nerves. His smile was like his music.